The 10 Acquisitions Yahoo's New CEO Should Make on Day One

[ The first acquisition target for Yahoo? Gawker. ]

By Jason Calacanis

A number of folks really liked my "mobile, social and video" plan for Yahoo from yesterday, and asked me privately to expand on my ideas. In fact, a couple of the folks were from inside of Yahoo or immediately "around it" (i.e., folks engaged in the “what the hell do we do with this huge asset”).

Instead of sending this to the insiders I figured I would share it with everyone in the hopes that a) you guys start reading my new blog LAUNCH on regular basis and b) that you send me the obvious ideas I’m clearly going to miss.


My Yahoo Mission Statement

Yahoo’s Mission: to be the most important content destination in the world.

Yes, you read that correctly, my mission statement for Yahoo is to create the most important content in the world. The content that informs, entertains, shocks, connects with, infuriates and inspires people more than any other content on the planet.

Not an easy task, and you’re not going to get there overnight. A realistic bill for my overhaul  given Yahoo’s huge checkbook and traffic footprint is about a year and under $1B.

You can’t just buy the brands below and solve the problems, you have to...

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Turntable-like Chill Broadcasting TC Disrupt -- Meh But Has Potential

We love the Chill concept of watching videos together and are thrilled the team recently raised $1.5M from Kleiner Perkins, Redpoint, Atlas Venture and investor Paul Kedrosky.

Our experience watching the TechCrunch Disrupt event in a special Chill room -- which is nicely branded and pretty full -- has an intimate feel, but Chill doesn't offer much functionality beyond what you can get in Ustream, Justin or YouTube Live. Frankly, we prefer watching...

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Americans Spend 3X More Time on Facebook Than Second Most-Popular Site--Nielsen Study

[ Courtesy of Nielsen's "State of the Media: The Social Media Report ]

Americans spent more than 53B minutes -- about 100K years -- in May 2011 on Facebook, where they spend more time than any other site, according to a Nielsen study.

Facebook's own stats claim 700B minutes a month, indicating that the U.S. audience is just a small slice of its overall popularity. Facebook says it has more than 750M members worldwide, and more than 250M active users access Facebook on their mobile device.

In a distant second place was Yahoo with...

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Posterous Launches Spaces to Bring Google+ Circles-Style Sharing to Your Parents

Focused on group sharing since late 2010,  three-year-old social blogging platform Posterous has now launched Posterous Spaces, a group-sharing platform across web and mobile devices that simplifies private sharing with different groups in your life. Also launching today is a new iPhone app that gives mobile users the same sharing abilities as the website (new Android app in the works).

Those with multiple "spaces" can manage them on a dashboard and auto-post updates to over 26 social services. Users can call follow different spaces and create a permanent archive of posts so they don't get lost in a stream. To help the less tech-savvy, Posterous optimizes content before embedding it in a space.

Google+ has made private and segmented sharing easier already, and Facebook recently launched more straightforward private sharing options [ see our story ].

But as Posterous founder and CEO Sachin Agarwal tells LAUNCH, "It's unclear if normal people have figured out...

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Google Docs Launching Comment-Only Sharing Options

Google Docs is rolling out a comment-only sharing option this week for users who don't want to allow full editing access to other people. 

No doubt users had asked for this, but Google wanted the feature for itself as well. Google Software Engineer Sarah Wu writes on the Docs blog, "Sometimes I want to let team members view and make comments without allowing them to directly edit my document."

To give someone limited access, users will need...

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